Judea Pearl is Chancellor's professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA, and a distinguished visiting professor at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1965. He is the director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Causal Inference. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, and a founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Among his many awards are the Turing Award, the Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science, The Allen Newell Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and the Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society. He is the author of several books and articles, and one of his most read books is The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (with Dana MacKenzie).

In this interview, we reflect on his academic journey and his pioneering contributions to the field of causality and causal inference.

I hope you enjoy it!

Adel

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About me, the interviewer. At the time of producing this interview, I was an Associate Professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, and an
Affiliated Associate Professor in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for the Social Sciences, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Previously he held positions at Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies, and the Alan Turing Institute.

My research has both a social scientific and methodological orientation. For the social sciences, I research the effects of economic, political, and natural shocks on living standards and health, globally and locally. I implement and develop novel methodologies in machine learning and causal inference to analyze the causes and consequences of poverty and health. I have published in journals such as PNAS, Science Advances, World Development, International J of Epidemiology, American J of Epidemiology, and Ecological Economics, and in machine-learning conferences as Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). More information at www.adeldaoud.se.

I am leading The AI and Global Development Lab. The vision of the Lab is to “combine AI, earth observation, and social theory to analyze sustainable development globally and locally.” More information is provided at www.global-lab.ai )

Music by Vincent Rubinetti
Download the music on Bandcamp:
https://vincerubinetti.bandcamp.com/album/the-music-of-3blue1brown
Stream the music on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1dVyjwS8FBqXhRunaG5W5u

Tags: Science, mentorship, leadership, coaching, academic growth, learning, building research environments, productivity, research, university, professor, doctoral studies, building your research program, causality, causal inference, computer science, AI, cognition, free will.

(From Youtube)